I disagree, I think real change will start with something very simple, no more campaign financing by corporations. Not a cent. Government for the PEOPLE.
is the one saving grace of analog, but in real life tests apparently the GSM technology still outperforms analog in terms of range, so even that one may not be holding... I think that analog is coming to an end in all communications fields, it will soon be the exclusive domain of HAM radio operators again.
It really amazes me how everybody seems to think that more information is key, whereas I think that *better* information is key. Datamining really is an advanced way of searching for the needle in that haystack and if you throw tons of non-relevant data in there you've just made your job that much harder. The big trick is to try to increase the quality of the data without missing important bits. Trawling all the grandmothers credit card transactions is not going to increase the S/N ratio.
Neither. But one thing did strike me. As a run of the mill and fairly low budget (by American standards) series Knight rider had an interesting component that is often overlooked. The interface with KITT was exclusively voice and nobody thought twice about it being 'realistic'. And here we are more than two decades later and we still don't have voice recognition or natural language processing that even comes close to what is displayed so off-handedly in the series. I often wonder what kind of peaceful results could be achieved with the kind of budgets that are thrown around in useless wars. Free college education for everybody ? Free healthcare ? Universal voice recognition ? AI ? an AIDS vaccine ? None of those seem too farfetched if you consider the normal research budgets for those subjects.
I'm from Europe, don't have much experience about how things are states side, but I can see from your explanation that there are huge differences. Sports in university here are purely recreational, not competitive (at least not that competitive, sure if you're on a team you want to win but not at all costs and nobody feels worse for losing). The academic side is definitely what it is all about, not the athletic side.
People here that go in to sports full time (say soccer or cycling) that I have any exposure to have never struck me as 'bright' outside of their field. Professional (non-recreational) sports and academia in Europe are two different worlds, as far as I know. Nobody *ever* got into a major university here because they were good at sports.
> Knowing more about a subject doesn't make you smarter
There are lots of people (including me) that disagree with you on that, but that might actually prove your point, not mine:) I think that is a matter of definitions though, I think with 'smarter' you are getting at generalized 'smarts', some measurable quantity of brain power, and I'm more thinking of being able to apply your brain better to the problems presented to it. That will only happen if you have knowledge, and most knowledge is of broader applicability than the subject that you picked it up in. Unless it's highly specialized of course. We excel at generalizing from examples but we need to be fed those examples first, and that's where the knowledge comes in.
> I can introduce you to people who competed at the highest levels of athletics and have also earned doctoral degrees. Will you seriously argue that they are stupid because they happened to play sports very successfully as a pastime?
obviously not:) I do not exactly excel at any sport *and* I don't have a degree ! These people to me appear to be very 'rounded' individuals, a healthy mind in a healthy body. I don't think they spent the majority of their time on their sports though, unless they were absolutely brilliant, and in that case I wonder what they could have done if they had totally given themselves to some science or other. Most people at the top of the scientific fields do not strike me as athletes in any way shape or form!
> Find me someone who is only good at one thing and I'll show you a very dysfunctional individual.
That was exactly what I had in mind, the athletes I was thinking of were the ones at the top that let go of life in order to excel, the 'one trick ponies'. Whenever they open their mouth almost without exception I wished they hadn't. And top scientists are probably just as dysfunctional in that particular sense as top athletes.
I always wonder what they must feel like when inevitably they get booted out of the way by the next generation and they find out that their skillsets have limited marketability outside maybe advertising (and that's hardly a plus).
Neal Stephenson will hopefully get a big lump of stock in the metaverse. Probably the end-point of convergence for all the media that we have today is something like the metaverse but I highly doubt if we have the technology to do it today, and that will likely cause a misfire like the early attempts at virtual reality. This kind of environment either works or it fails, there is no 'halfway there', immersion is not something you do on the cheap or with bad hardware. That just leads to frustration. It's interesting to see big names like IBM experimenting with this, it could very well be the end of the traffic problem if a fully immersive environment could be produced cheaply enough. Technically speaking the whole worlds commuting budget for office jobs is available for this to be made a reality.
If you excel at something then that will go at the expense of your other development. Athletes excel at using their body, so brainpower wise I'd expect them to be sub-average because they could have chosen to work on that instead. It's a matter of fixed resources (time & energy) and a choice of application. You can't be as good at math as you could have been if you spent a large amount of your time training your body instead of say studying math. Most kids that I have seen that were 'good at sports' ended up wasting tons of valuable time trying to get even better at it neglecting other aspects of their lives. The people at the top of the Athletes pyramid are the ones that almost exclusively devote their time to their sports, and unfortunately whenever they get interviewed that shows.
athletes are not known for their brainpower. Whenever they open their mouth you wonder why we even bother to interview these people. What they think is about as interesting as say your average movie star. Oh, wait, Schwarzenegger... now I get it...
interesting ? Rubbish! Just because a spokesperson says it doesn't make it true. Ask Scot McLellan:) The first 3,000 years of civilization ?? When hardly anybody was literate and counting was like 1,2, many ? Come off it, of all the nonsense comparisons this one really is far out. Is a year of ancient civilization now a performance benchmark ?
>> The CIA is part of the government, and the government is elected by the people. It is an extension of the people's will. Therefore, anything the government does, if not quickly corrected, is assumed to be the people's will, and therefore "right". And if an action is OK for the government to do, as far as I'm concerned it's good enough for the rest of us too.
That had me laughing out loud.
Especially the bit about the government being elected by 'the people' and the bit where it is an extension of people's will. That's the theory, sure. But in practice it doesn't really work that way. There is *nothing* you can do about these loose cannons having their way with you or anybody else that would try to stand up to them, and if you think there is then please get moving. Out of control is the only way to describe the situation.
30 years of diplomacy and incremental gains have been wiped out in a little less than a decade.
the only thing you 'gained' from the torture is the realization in the rest of the so-called civilized world that America has lost it's marbles and can no longer be trusted. Well, with the exception of Poland maybe.
good luck finding a judge that understands enough of the issues at hand here to make a 'good' judgement. Remember, you don't need to be guilty at all, you just need to be *found* guilty.
Torrentspy does not pass on copyrighted information, this is just one big fishing expedition, using the judicial arm of America to extract information that they will then use in different lawsuits.
being on slashdot and having nothing better to do except for keeping up with 'whats new in tech' is an excellent way of saying you don't have much of a life:)
oh, and by chance I did know about these other flash drives but I don't think that gives me moral superiority over anybody. Except you perhaps because of that...
Maybe next time you could try to just pass the information and leave the attitude ?
I never understood what he said to be taken literal, more like he used some archaic saying. Along the lines of 'all the kings horses and all the kings men' (no offsene to kings or horses I hope;) ).
>> Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty >> of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at >> it from a slightly different perspective.
> While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name?
> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, that was really nice and interesting stuff.)
Lighten up a bit.
If you really want to teach someone (anyone) then you should try not to come off as a total asshole, snipe attacks, dragging in everything but the kitchen sink to prove yourself, getting yourself worked up into a raging frenzy (by your own admission).
That's not how I remember any of the people that ever taught me.
Especially not whilst being anonymous at the same time, that's simply not nice. Most people don't even bother to read at the level where they can see your writings, they didn't call the 'guest' account 'anonymous coward' for nothing here. I'm out here with my name in full public view, 3 seconds of googling and you know who I am and what I do for a living (and after reading this how I got there) and if you're clever where I live and what my home phone # is.
You're hiding behind a screen of anonymity and sniping at me by poking holes in something that was kept fairly simple on purpose to demonstrate your 'superiority'. But my initial writing was perfectly sufficient given the situation. In other words, you may know more but you are not very tactful, instead of expanding on what I wrote and recognizing that what I wrote was a simplified view of how things work in a tube, if you feel that there is a need for that (but not the be-all-end-all 100% optimized for production situation in a tube) and if you felt so inclined you could have simply expanded on it without making it personal.
This is not the annual ARRL get together, this is/.
Making things personal whilst being an AC is not a mode of discussion that will make you my friend any time soon.
That sort of attitude tends to impede the flow of information. You come across as a *very* frustrated old guy, that thinks he's due some respect because of his age and knowledge that landed here by accident, and the more you refer to your books from 1962 and your vintage TEK (guess what, I have one too, well maybe not that much of a vintage one, a really neat dual trace, it even had a calibration certificate when I got it but it is most certainly out of 'spec' by now, it was moved several times internationally, but I did give one of the not very portable modular ones to my kid to take apart (it was gone beyond salvage, unfortunately, too many bits were missing)) the more you confirm that image.
By analogy, if I explain to my son how a car engine works, you would come and stand next to me to tell me in a loud and belligerent voice how I know nothing about car engines because I left out the oil pump and am showing my ignorance./. has lots of people that already know how vacuum tubes work, but there are also plenty of folks that haven't got a clue what a vacuum tube even is. For those that already know I really doubt I could teach them anything worth knowing (yourself ?), for the rest, people that can't remember a time before the CD and the chip a device made of glass and bits of wire that you could build a computer out of must be a pretty weird idea.
No need to complicate that vision by adding in all the bits and pieces that make it manufacturable at a low price or hyper efficient. We didn't address the silver on the legs either did we ? (I'm sure you will now launch in a tirade of how ignorant I am and that it's not really silver if you still don't get my point).
When explaining a transistor to someone you also would not right away start with vacuum deposition techniq
> Sweet Jesus your ignorance is astounding. The reason lightbulb filaments are wound in a spiral (actually a spiral of spiral wire) is to trap heat; it has to operate near boiling to emit visible light. It has nothing to do with emitting electrons.
Trap the heat ??? that must be one of those things that we are not going to agree on, no matter how you produce a given amount of power in a given amount of space you'll not be 'trapping' any of it, the object (vacuum tube cathode, electric blanket, whatever floats your boat) will simply go up in temperature until it is emitting as much heat as you are pumping in to it in the form of electrical power.
The spiral is simply a way to fit a long piece of wire into a smaller space so that it can reach the required temperature, if it could be done with a short and thick piece of wire then they would have done that instead but they can't because the wire would not have the correct resistance in that shape. That's very simple, elementary 'ohms' law level stuff, I'm sure even you can get it: short & thick: low resistance -> very little power will be transformed into heat (which is the main function of a heater), therefore we use a longer wire and we wind it up into a spiral, same physical size as the thick piece but more resistance.
As for those being the 'exception', then just about all the tubes I've looked at where the exception... unlucky me...
What is heat if it is not the primary emission of the *heater* filament in your book then ?
The grid, photomultiplier tubes and loads of other things that have nothing to do with the price of tea in China do not come in to it. I don't even care if you even have a grid in there, we could be talking about a diode.
I agree with you that if the grid starts emitting electrodes that things are out of whack though, it's not supposed to do that:)
If you are shaking while posting *anonymously* on a forum somewhere I suggest you check your medication levels, maybe you missed a day or two ? Or do you feel threatened in some way ? Or is it that you think lobbing insults anonymously does not afford you enough protection already ?
Also, there is an excellent article that I've found while trying to corroborate your statement about the filament being wound doubly, unfortunately that wasn't in there but it makes for interesting reading anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't Wolfram have a stake in that journal ?
I disagree, I think real change will start with something very simple, no more campaign financing by corporations. Not a cent. Government for the PEOPLE.
Well, because otherwise they might think it refers to pig meat ? Maybe we should get rid of capital letters altogether :)
;)
I humbly apologize and will never use HAM again but will in the future refer to 'persons that have amateur radio communications as their hobby'
talk about bad analogies...
sorry, but I think you lost me there, would you mind explaining what you meant with 'country == record companies' ?
I can see the situation in court, the defendaners prefexing every statement with 'iaanal'...
is the one saving grace of analog, but in real life tests apparently the GSM technology still outperforms analog in terms of range, so even that one may not be holding... I think that analog is coming to an end in all communications fields, it will soon be the exclusive domain of HAM radio operators again.
science friction ? ;)
I think the FBI simply wants a bigger haystack :)
It really amazes me how everybody seems to think that more information is key, whereas I think that *better* information is key. Datamining really is an advanced way of searching for the needle in that haystack and if you throw tons of non-relevant data in there you've just made your job that much harder. The big trick is to try to increase the quality of the data without missing important bits. Trawling all the grandmothers credit card transactions is not going to increase the S/N ratio.
funny how this is considered 'news', there are lots of little boards around the Geode chip, which is essentially a pc on a single chip.
Neither. But one thing did strike me. As a run of the mill and fairly low budget (by American standards) series Knight rider had an interesting component that is often overlooked. The interface with KITT was exclusively voice and nobody thought twice about it being 'realistic'. And here we are more than two decades later and we still don't have voice recognition or natural language processing that even comes close to what is displayed so off-handedly in the series. I often wonder what kind of peaceful results could be achieved with the kind of budgets that are thrown around in useless wars. Free college education for everybody ? Free healthcare ? Universal voice recognition ? AI ? an AIDS vaccine ? None of those seem too farfetched if you consider the normal research budgets for those subjects.
Thank you for all this insight.
I'm from Europe, don't have much experience about how things are states side, but I can see from your explanation that there are huge differences. Sports in university here are purely recreational, not competitive (at least not that competitive, sure if you're on a team you want to win but not at all costs and nobody feels worse for losing). The academic side is definitely what it is all about, not the athletic side.
People here that go in to sports full time (say soccer or cycling) that I have any exposure to have never struck me as 'bright' outside of their field. Professional (non-recreational) sports and academia in Europe are two different worlds, as far as I know. Nobody *ever* got into a major university here because they were good at sports.
Thank you for your thoughtful answer.
:) I think that is a matter of definitions though, I think with 'smarter' you are getting at generalized 'smarts', some measurable quantity of brain power, and I'm more thinking of being able to apply your brain better to the problems presented to it. That will only happen if you have knowledge, and most knowledge is of broader applicability than the subject that you picked it up in. Unless it's highly specialized of course. We excel at generalizing from examples but we need to be fed those examples first, and that's where the knowledge comes in.
:) I do not exactly excel at any sport *and* I don't have a degree ! These people to me appear to be very 'rounded' individuals, a healthy mind in a healthy body. I don't think they spent the majority of their time on their sports though, unless they were absolutely brilliant, and in that case I wonder what they could have done if they had totally given themselves to some science or other. Most people at the top of the scientific fields do not strike me as athletes in any way shape or form!
> Knowing more about a subject doesn't make you smarter
There are lots of people (including me) that disagree with you on that, but that might actually prove your point, not mine
> I can introduce you to people who competed at the highest levels of athletics and have also earned doctoral degrees. Will you seriously argue that they are stupid because they happened to play sports very successfully as a pastime?
obviously not
> Find me someone who is only good at one thing and I'll show you a very dysfunctional individual.
That was exactly what I had in mind, the athletes I was thinking of were the ones at the top that let go of life in order to excel, the 'one trick ponies'. Whenever they open their mouth almost without exception I wished they hadn't. And top scientists are probably just as dysfunctional in that particular sense as top athletes.
I always wonder what they must feel like when inevitably they get booted out of the way by the next generation and they find out that their skillsets have limited marketability outside maybe advertising (and that's hardly a plus).
Neal Stephenson will hopefully get a big lump of stock in the metaverse.
Probably the end-point of convergence for all the media that we have today is something like the metaverse but I highly doubt if we have the technology to do it today, and that will likely cause a misfire like the early attempts at virtual reality.
This kind of environment either works or it fails, there is no 'halfway there', immersion is not something you do on the cheap or with bad hardware. That just leads to frustration.
It's interesting to see big names like IBM experimenting with this, it could very well be the end of the traffic problem if a fully immersive environment could be produced cheaply enough. Technically speaking the whole worlds commuting budget for office jobs is available for this to be made a reality.
If you excel at something then that will go at the expense of your other development. Athletes excel at using their body, so brainpower wise I'd expect them to be sub-average because they could have chosen to work on that instead. It's a matter of fixed resources (time & energy) and a choice of application.
You can't be as good at math as you could have been if you spent a large amount of your time training your body instead of say studying math.
Most kids that I have seen that were 'good at sports' ended up wasting tons of valuable time trying to get even better at it neglecting other aspects of their lives. The people at the top of the Athletes pyramid are the ones that almost exclusively devote their time to their sports, and unfortunately whenever they get interviewed that shows.
athletes are not known for their brainpower. Whenever they open their mouth you wonder why we even bother to interview these people. What they think is about as interesting as say your average movie star. Oh, wait, Schwarzenegger... now I get it...
interesting ? Rubbish! Just because a spokesperson says it doesn't make it true. Ask Scot McLellan :)
The first 3,000 years of civilization ?? When hardly anybody was literate and counting was like 1,2, many ?
Come off it, of all the nonsense comparisons this one really is far out. Is a year of ancient civilization now a performance benchmark ?
>> The CIA is part of the government, and the government is elected by the people. It is an extension of the people's will. Therefore, anything the government does, if not quickly corrected, is assumed to be the people's will, and therefore "right". And if an action is OK for the government to do, as far as I'm concerned it's good enough for the rest of us too.
That had me laughing out loud.
Especially the bit about the government being elected by 'the people' and the bit where it is an extension of people's will. That's the theory, sure. But in practice it doesn't really work that way. There is *nothing* you can do about these loose cannons having their way with you or anybody else that would try to stand up to them, and if you think there is then please get moving. Out of control is the only way to describe the situation.
30 years of diplomacy and incremental gains have been wiped out in a little less than a decade.
the only thing you 'gained' from the torture is the realization in the rest of the so-called civilized world that America has lost it's marbles and can no longer be trusted. Well, with the exception of Poland maybe.
good luck finding a judge that understands enough of the issues at hand here to make a 'good' judgement. Remember, you don't need to be guilty at all, you just need to be *found* guilty.
evidence ? What evidence ?
Torrentspy does not pass on copyrighted information, this is just one big fishing expedition, using the judicial arm of America to extract information that they will then use in different lawsuits.
being on slashdot and having nothing better to do except for keeping up with 'whats new in tech' is an excellent way of saying you don't have much of a life :)
oh, and by chance I did know about these other flash drives but I don't think that gives me moral superiority over anybody. Except you perhaps because of that...
Maybe next time you could try to just pass the information and leave the attitude ?
I never understood what he said to be taken literal, more like he used some archaic saying. Along the lines of 'all the kings horses and all the kings men' (no offsene to kings or horses I hope ;) ).
>> Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty
>> of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at
>> it from a slightly different perspective.
> While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name?
Watson comes to mind:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/18/science.race/index.html
hello again, mr. Anonymous.
/.
/. has lots of people that already know how vacuum tubes work, but there are also plenty of folks that haven't got a clue what a vacuum tube even is. For those that already know I really doubt I could teach them anything worth knowing (yourself ?), for the rest, people that can't remember a time before the CD and the chip a device made of glass and bits of wire that you could build a computer out of must be a pretty weird idea.
> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, that was really nice and interesting stuff.)
Lighten up a bit.
If you really want to teach someone (anyone) then you should try not to come off as a total asshole, snipe attacks, dragging in everything but the kitchen sink to prove yourself, getting yourself worked up into a raging frenzy (by your own admission).
That's not how I remember any of the people that ever taught me.
Especially not whilst being anonymous at the same time, that's simply not nice. Most people don't even bother to read at the level where they can see your writings, they didn't call the 'guest' account 'anonymous coward' for nothing here. I'm out here with my name in full public view, 3 seconds of googling and you know who I am and what I do for a living (and after reading this how I got there) and if you're clever where I live and what my home phone # is.
You're hiding behind a screen of anonymity and sniping at me by poking holes in something that was kept fairly simple on purpose to demonstrate your 'superiority'. But my initial writing was perfectly sufficient given the situation. In other words, you may know more but you are not very tactful, instead of expanding on what I wrote and recognizing that what I wrote was a simplified view of how things work in a tube, if you feel that there is a need for that (but not the be-all-end-all 100% optimized for production situation in a tube) and if you felt so inclined you could have simply expanded on it without making it personal.
This is not the annual ARRL get together, this is
Making things personal whilst being an AC is not a mode of discussion that will make you my friend any time soon.
That sort of attitude tends to impede the flow of information. You come across as a *very* frustrated old guy, that thinks he's due some respect because of his age and knowledge that landed here by accident, and the more you refer to your books from 1962 and your vintage TEK (guess what, I have one too, well maybe not that much of a vintage one, a really neat dual trace, it even had a calibration certificate when I got it but it is most certainly out of 'spec' by now, it was moved several times internationally, but I did give one of the not very portable modular ones to my kid to take apart (it was gone beyond salvage, unfortunately, too many bits were missing)) the more you confirm that image.
By analogy, if I explain to my son how a car engine works, you would come and stand next to me to tell me in a loud and belligerent voice how I know nothing about car engines because I left out the oil pump and am showing my ignorance.
No need to complicate that vision by adding in all the bits and pieces that make it manufacturable at a low price or hyper efficient. We didn't address the silver on the legs either did we ? (I'm sure you will now launch in a tirade of how ignorant I am and that it's not really silver if you still don't get my point).
When explaining a transistor to someone you also would not right away start with vacuum deposition techniq
> Sweet Jesus your ignorance is astounding. The reason lightbulb filaments are wound in a spiral (actually a spiral of spiral wire) is to trap heat; it has to operate near boiling to emit visible light. It has nothing to do with emitting electrons.
:)
Trap the heat ??? that must be one of those things that we are not going to agree on, no matter how you produce a given amount of power in a given amount of space you'll not be 'trapping' any of it, the object (vacuum tube cathode, electric blanket, whatever floats your boat) will simply go up in temperature until it is emitting as much heat as you are pumping in to it in the form of electrical power.
The spiral is simply a way to fit a long piece of wire into a smaller space so that it can reach the required temperature, if it could be done with a short and thick piece of wire then they would have done that instead but they can't because the wire would not have the correct resistance in that shape. That's very simple, elementary 'ohms' law level stuff, I'm sure even you can get it: short & thick: low resistance -> very little power will be transformed into heat (which is the main function of a heater), therefore we use a longer wire and we wind it up into a spiral, same physical size as the thick piece but more resistance.
As for those being the 'exception', then just about all the tubes I've looked at where the exception... unlucky me...
What is heat if it is not the primary emission of the *heater* filament in your book then ?
It's easy: primary emission: infrared radiation, aka heat, secondary emission: electrons...
The grid, photomultiplier tubes and loads of other things that have nothing to do with the price of tea in China do not come in to it. I don't even care if you even have a grid in there, we could be talking about a diode.
I agree with you that if the grid starts emitting electrodes that things are out of whack though, it's not supposed to do that
If you are shaking while posting *anonymously* on a forum somewhere I suggest you check your medication levels, maybe you missed a day or two ? Or do you feel threatened in some way ? Or is it that you think lobbing insults anonymously does not afford you enough protection already ?
Also, there is an excellent article that I've found while trying to corroborate your statement about the filament being wound doubly, unfortunately that wasn't in there but it makes for interesting reading anyway.
http://www.john-a-harper.com/tubes201/
and with that I'm off to bed, if you wish to continue the conversation I suggest you log in.